Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Who Should Be in Politics, part 1

One
of the most debilitating errors those on any side of a position can make is—to
mangle a phrase from T.S. Eliot—espousing the right thing for the wrong reason;
that is, advocating for a particular person or purpose on grounds which are
irrelevant or, worse still, false.In
political argument it is common, for example, to advocate for one’s policies
based on what some individual or party did in the past.This would be a perfectly acceptable way of
beginning a cause and effect argument, which would involve tracing all the
numerous historical details connected with the old case in question, which
would allow us to legitimately apply it to our present case.But in the (perhaps justified) judgment of
our leaders this country is not capable of following so sustained as discourse;
and so they resort to mere associations.

It was notalways so.Perhaps it need not be so today.But it is indubitably true that if one treats
a Democracy like a many-headed beast instead of a body of reasonable members,
it will begin behaving as such.This is
simple psychology.Offer people easily
consumed junk—whether it be in the form of food, movies, memes, or political
discourse—and they will not only lap it up, but gradually come to lose their
appreciation for whatever finer things they might once have enjoyed—and worse
still, their ability to refine their physical, aesthetic, moral, and
intellectual palates further will be degraded.Listen to enough political hectoring, and you will be desensitized to
genuine political debate.The next
person who takes it upon himself to offer you a real argument will have to work
that much harder to make it intelligible, because your habit of responding to the
simplest and most obvious level of associations, tones, and expressions will be
that much more firmly rooted, thanks to the ongoing fertilization of bad
rhetoric.

In
the current campaign season, there has been the usual and perhaps more than the
usual share of bad rhetoric, to the detriment of the country.A good deal of it centers around one
particular candidate on the Republican side of the aisle.

Notice
that I don’t say this candidate emits simplistic rhetoric himself; there is no
point in making such a point.The
problem is not his rhetoric, but the response to it—not just on the part of
prospective voters, but on the part of politicos, journalists, back-bench
wiseacres like myself, and (of course) the other candidates.Rather than providing an articulate response
to what they dislike about Trump, too many of the aforementioned have
criticized his hair, his gestures, his sentence structure, his disorganized
campaign.Those things may all deserve
criticism, from an aesthetic standpoint; but until Americans actually learn to
appreciate Dante again, attacks on the déclassé are worse than ridiculous.

But yes, this IS an
invitation to play the where-would-Dante-place-Trump game.

Nor
is it sufficient to say that Donald Trump is not a True Conservative, our
current version of the old but lively No True Scotsman fallacy.Once again, this is certainly true under many
meanings of the word conservative (including meanings that I would accept) but
it is pointless unless (1) the accuser also carefully and consistently defines “conservative”
as he intends to use it, and (2) the accuser offers an alternative candidate,
while articulating how said candidate more closely matches his ideas of what
the word means.But I, having wasted far
too many hours on a matter that is not likely to change my mind in any case,
can affirm that I have yet to see anyone do this convincingly.

The
worst failures to attack Trump’s conservative credentials
are those which aim at achieving the first goal (define “conservative”) but
fail badly.For example, this:

Conservatism regards politics as a
craft similar to carpentry and farming. Skill and success depend on personal
understanding of practices and traditions handed down from generation to
generation. Effective statesmen absorb and act on the embedded knowledge and
practices of the people they represent, in the nation they belong to, and in
the daily flux of its political system. Political experience is specific to the
moment and the place; it is not readily exported to nations other than where it
was formed; it is not timeless (as countless “out of touch” politicians have
discovered). In the setting of the here and now, political experience is
invaluable and irreplaceable.

Liberals and socialists believe
differently. To them, legislation and governing are universal practices, the
application of theories that have been constructed by scholars far removed from
the political arena. It follows that a novice can enter parliament or
government and know what to do—it’s all in the textbooks. Indeed, a strong
interpretation of the liberal or socialist view implies that this is the only
way to be properly prepared for politics. Trump’s supporters share this
delusion.

It’s
like using “dentist” as a smear word.I
know you’ve seen several bad dentists.I
know a
bad dentist can really mess up a lot of people for life.I know they are expensive and don’t really
add much to the economy.I know they’re
kind of weird—why would anyone want to spend all
day looking into THAT?!!But really,
this doesn’t make us—erm, them—bad
people.

… as I was saying: aside from using “scholars”
as a smear word, the author here paints a portrait of the liberal vs.
conservative divide which is dangerously oversimplified.It is quite true that liberal academics (of
which there
are many more than conservative academics) enjoy crafting plans to make the
world a better place, according to their lights; it is also quite true that
they often pass these ideas successfully on to their students and embed
them in their writings.But does it
really follow from this that “a novice can enter parliament or government and
know what to do”?Both liberals and
conservatives already in politics tend, I think to insist that—textbook
learning aside—no novice can successfully enter their world.This has been true at least since Joseph Paine
tried to tell Jefferson Smith how Washington works.

But
universally agreed on as it is, few “truisms” are more debilitating to civic
spirit than this one.If it is in any
sense a conservative idea (a doubtful proposition), it is an idea that
conservatives would do better to lose.